Blaine—who, among other feats, has buried himself alive in Manhattan, withstood forty-four days without food in a glass cube suspended above London, and held his breath for a record seventeen minutes on the “Oprah Winfrey Show”—is the Liberty Science Center’s first “magician in residence.” In practice, that means he gets two things: a room in the basement to use as a rehearsal space and the satisfaction of thrilling young people. In exchange, he provides some measure of scientific edification, which is mainly diffused through a blog that documents the science behind his underwater act (newly developed contact lenses, specially-calculated water salinity) and invites readers to suggest things for him to do underwater in the show.

The arrangement is the brainchild of Paul Hoffman, an erstwhile science journalist and editor-in-chief of Discover magazine, who now serves as the museum’s C.E.O. and is a longtime friend of Blaine’s. The two met fifteen years ago at a meeting called by the head of NASA to brainstorm ways to increase public enthusiasm for space exploration. Blaine was then planning to stand for thirty hours atop a hundred-foot pole in Bryant Square Park, and Hoffman counselled him to play mental chess in order to help pass the time. (Blaine pulled off the stunt in 2002, and Adam Gopnik wrote about it for The New Yorker.)

It was a natural friendship, in part because Blaine has always had a scientific bent of mind, which is not unusual for a magician. Though magic and science are diametrically opposed in theory, they are—like disingenuous political adversaries cutting a secret deal—cozy allies in practice. “Most of the guys I know that are interested in magic are very interested in math, in science, in logic,” Blaine told me after he had showered and changed out of the soaked suit. The science-magic alliance makes sense: to convince other people to believe in magic, you must assiduously not believe in it yourself.

The single-minded determination with which Blaine approaches a problem in magic—you might even call it a “scientific” approach—comes across in a TED talk he gave, in 2010, about how he held his breath for record time. Reeling off the list of medical professionals he consulted, and the ingenious methods they devised to help him, he sounds like a medical researcher who has taken a break from the lab to give a university lecture. It’s a mindset that he’s applied to earlier feats, too. With a flash of pride, he tells the audience—of his forty-four day London fast—that he “felt very validated when The New England Journal of Medicine actually used the research for science.”

In this telling, Blaine is not the magician so much as the scientific explorer—the frills of magic are secondary. “The producers of my television special thought that just watching somebody holding their breath and almost drowning is too boring for television,” he says of an earlier attempt at the record. “So I had to add handcuffs.” But does Blaine really care only about practical matters, smoke and mirrors be damned? Is he a scientist in disguise? Not really, and he would be the first to admit it. “There’s probably a part of me that’s looking for the excitement,” he told me.

But his interest isn’t merely performance, either. There’s something else that distinguishes him from other magicians, even if his obsession with science does not. When Blaine performs an unbelievable feat, he really performs an unbelievable feat—he doesn’t just make it look like he did. (“When David holds his breath, he really does it,” Hoffman told me. “There’s no trick involved.”) It’s not that Blaine, in practice, has any great objection to fooling the audience. For one thing, he’s an astoundingly adept sleight-of-hand artist. And when a doctor friend he consulted about breaking the breath-holding record told him, “David, you’re a magician—create the illusion of not breathing and it will be much easier,” he tried to do just that.

But the mere fact that no illusion ended up being practical doesn’t fully explain why Blaine ultimately had to actually hold his breath. If he could have pulled off an acceptably faithful illusion, he might have, but it wouldn’t have slaked his deep thirst to push the boundary of physical human achievement. “To be able to actually do something that seems impossible,” Blaine told me, “that’s been my lifelong quest.” In this, he reminds me of the novelty performer in Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist,” who wastes away, fasting in a neglected cage, while bright-eyed children stream past him toward the more vital zoo animals on display. On some level, the hunger artist doesn’t mind: he craves the satisfaction of “withdrawing deep into himself, paying no attention to anyone or anything, not even to the all-important striking of the clock that was the only piece of furniture in his cage, but merely staring into vacancy with half-shut eyes, now and then taking a sip from a tiny glass of water to moisten his lips.” Now here’s Blaine, talking to Gopnik in 2008:

My endurance pieces are all about taking away the ego, putting yourself in a position so intense that the ordinary “I” doesn’t exist anymore. You’re surviving the way a baby does—or it’s like just before an accident, when you see everything, the seats and the road, and the dashboard and your life, in slow motion. That heightened sense of awareness, the blinding flash of being shocked out of your logical mind—that’s magic for me.

That speaks of something more than a desire to illustrate science lessons for the masses, or to help develop new underwater contact lenses. It suggests something more, too, than even the desire to wow an audience. It is an all-encompassing obsession that emanates from the deepest part of Blaine’s being. Something similar is what drives our greatest scientists. Something similar, too, is what stokes public enthusiasm for NASA—an appeal to wonder, imagination, and the outer limits of human experience. Judging by the bright, stunned, young eyes you’ll occasionally find these days in the basement of the Liberty Science Center, it’s not a bad method for stoking enthusiasm in middle-school science students, either.

Photograph by Andy Kropa/Redux.